In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris aresearch team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be oneof the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hearabout it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of readingscientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name,though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomicparticles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate witheach other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matterwhether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. Theproblem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenetthat no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since travelingfaster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the timebarrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up withelaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspiredothers to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect'sfindings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite itsapparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic andsplendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must firstunderstand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensionalphotograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in thelight of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off thereflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area wherethe two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of lightand dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by anotherlaser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkablecharacteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half andthen illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain theentire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film willalways be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the originalimage. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains allthe information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with anentirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history,Western science has labored under the bias that the best way tounderstand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it andstudy its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lendthemselves to this approach. If we try to take apart somethingconstructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we willonly get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect'sdiscovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able toremain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them isnot because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth,but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeperlevel of reality such particles are not individual entities, but areactually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers thefollowing illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unableto see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what itcontains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's frontand the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that thefish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because thecameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightlydifferent. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually becomeaware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different butcorresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side.If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might evenconclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with oneanother, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomicparticles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection betweensubatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level ofreality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own thatis analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such assubatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only aportion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and moreunderlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as thepreviously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality iscomprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, ahologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possessother rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomicparticles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality allthings in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to thesubatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heartthat beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seekto categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of theuniverse, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all ofnature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewedas fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universein which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time andthree-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors,would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past,present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that giventhe proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into thesuperholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from thelong-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing,for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has givenbirth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains everysubatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration ofmatter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whalesto gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All ThatIs."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might liehidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have noreason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps thesuperholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "aninfinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universeis a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standfordneurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of theholographicnature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and wherememories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shownthat rather than being confined to a specific location, memories aredispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist KarlLashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed hewas unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it hadlearned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come upwith a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature ofmemory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography andrealized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for.Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings ofneurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in thesame way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entirearea of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words,Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so manymemories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has thecapacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits ofinformation during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount ofinformation contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their othercapabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for informationstorage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike apiece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images onthe same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of filmcan hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need fromthe enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brainfunctions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you totell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have toclumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file toarrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike",and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking processis that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated withevery other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram.Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected withevery other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of across-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle thatbecomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain.Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies itreceives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on)into the concrete world of our perceptions.

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best.Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device ableto convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherentimage, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographicprinciples to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives throughthe senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographicprinciples to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, hasgained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended theholographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by thefact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads,even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered thatholographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, arecording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncannyrealism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" realityby relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal ofexperimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broaderrange of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems aresensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in partdependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells inour bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findingssuggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that suchfrequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of thebrain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if theconcreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there"is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also ahologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur andmathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes ofobjective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East havelong upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we maythink we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is anillusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea offrequency,and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical realityisbut one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram'sviews, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although manyscientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. Asmall but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accuratemodel of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe itmay solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by scienceand even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that manypara-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms ofthe holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisibleportions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected,telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel fromthemind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance pointandhelps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. Inparticular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model forunderstanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individualsduring altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as apsychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly becameconvinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species ofprehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not onlygave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuledinsuch a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species'sanatomywas a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no priorknowledgeabout such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed thatincertain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play animportant role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research,Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying withvirtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings whichhelped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States).Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscurezoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzlingpsychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap intosome sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little orno education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerarypractices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories ofexperience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, ofprecognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-lifeincarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested intherapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because thecommon element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of anindividual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/orlimitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations"transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychologycalled "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychologygarnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and hasbecomea respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of hiscolleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarrepsychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed withtheadvent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, alabyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists orhas existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of spaceand time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays intothe labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hardsciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College,has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographicillusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain producesconsciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain --as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has causedresearchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of thehealing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If theapparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projectionof consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsiblefor our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view asmiraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousnesswhich in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization maywork so well because in the holographic domain of thought images areultimately as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality becomeexplainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of UnknownThings," biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with anIndonesianshaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make anentiregrove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as heandanother astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused thetrees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times insuccession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining suchevents, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality isonly aholographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we callconsensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the humanunconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographicparadigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are notcommonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with thebeliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits tothe extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw uponit any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with thepower of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda duringhis encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, nomore or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we wantwhen we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect,for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random eventswould have to be seen as based on holographic principles and thereforedetermined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makessense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for eventhe most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted inscience or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say thatit has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And evenif it is found that the holographic model does not provide the bestexplanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back andforth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley,a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate thatwe must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".